It’s not too often that the central argument of a contemporary philosopher gets its own Wikipedia page, but that’s how famous is the pro-choice argument of MIT philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson, in her 1971 essay A Defense of Abortion.
I teach a unit on abortion in my contemporary moral problems course, for which I have steady (actually, kind of overwhelming) enrollments, thanks in large part to the requirement that every student at my university take a course in ethics.
Thomson, writing a couple of years before the passage of Roe v. Wade, decides to challenge the assumption that IF the fetus is a person from conception, then it follows automatically that abortions are (in most, if not all, cases) morally wrong. Instead of just making her case directly, she uses a thought experiment, and argues by analogy:
It sounds plausible. But now let me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, “Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you–we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.”
Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. “Tough luck. I agree. but now you’ve got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.” I imagine you would regard this as outrageous, which suggests that something really is wrong with that plausible-sounding argument I mentioned a moment ago.
It’s interesting that students often embrace the message (or invitation to think) presented by Omelas, and understand quite well that Le Guin is talking, not about some other peoples, but about us, the readers. Yet, many students, perhaps the majority (in my experience), whether pro- or anti-choice, have serious reservations about Thomson’s argument.
In contrast to the skilled worldbuilding and writing of Le Guin, Thomson’s “story” is presented briefly and schematically. It’s unrealistic in more ways that one could count. The title of the article (“A Defense of Abortion”) and introductory material place the reader immediately in mind of what to expect, and so s/he is often resistant to suddenly thinking about violinists. And arguments by analogy are, by their very nature, irritating. This is because (a) they feel like they are taking you off track (why are we talking about violinists?), and (b) when well done, they often reveal an inconsistency in our own thinking.
There are questions we don’t ask in this class, about why it’s a violinist, why it’s the society of music lovers, why it’s a “he”, why it’s a medical setting, how the metaphor-within-a-metaphor of “unplugging” functions, etc. I don’t encourage those questions in this class, because I am doing moral philosophy, and I read the analogy in a very specific way. But I might well ask them in Ethics and Fiction. So the context is affecting me, as well.
Thomson’s article has inspired loads of commentary, maybe more than any other philosophical article published in the second half of the twentieth century. What she proves — even what she is trying to prove — is still a subject of major debate. But Thomson definitely pushes on the tension between a set of claims that folks who are opposed to abortion often accept: (1) that abortion is impermissible b/c the fetus has a right to life which the pregnant woman must protect, and (2) we don’t have significant obligations to strangers. In general, the article forces us to ask how much work the “right to life” is really doing in pro-life arguments. It also forces us to consider how impoverished our moral vocabulary would be if it were restricted to rights talk. And in doing so, it paves the way for our next readings, from the perspective of virtue theory and feminist ethics.
It’s worth asking about philosophers’ frequent use of thought experiments, most of which are violent or bloody. Should these be read, not as logical arguments, but as constructed narrative? And what would that tell us?
Related posts:
As far as I’m concerned, the only people who should be involved in the decision are the parents of the future baby and its medical carers, who may be asked to perform the procedure. It’s nobody else’s business, and no hi-falutin’ arguments can change that.
With the exception of the government, whose job is to decide at what age the embryo is a viable human being, ie it can survive outside its parent. But once the law is set, that’s it, until medical science forces them to revive it.
I have no comments on the argument itself because this is one of those types of discussions that I believe is best served live and in person so one is truly forced to listen and not just react to the written word. I find myself firmly in the pro-choice camp for a multitude of reasons. The most significant of which tends to be ***eta** a personal** belief/analysis that the issue itself isn’t really about a right to life by the most virulent anti-choice platform champions because if it was then they’d champion much more than the anti-choice and would in fact be pro-life and thinking about issues like the one you described in Le Guin’s short story. Oops. Didn’t mean to say even that much. Sorry.
All that said, I do believe I would love taking your class. If I ever move to Maine… LOL
I, too, am pro-choice, but like your students I find Thomson’s thinking not quite on. The “story” just feels strange and David Lynch-like. Like “you” just wake up and there’s this “violinist” next to you? Is the doctor a midget? Did Trent Reznor write the soundtrack?
Reading your blog I get the sense that a lot of the stories and extended metaphors used in ethics classes have the same effect on students and story problems in math. That is, the strangeness of the scenario detracts from the actual problem of that the story wants you to focus on. It seems like it ought to be a narrative, that their ought to be a plot, but there isn’t and it turns the focus. Why, I ask myself, would I be rowing a boat to town with a guy named Horatio? Who cares how many hours it takes us to get there?
If they are read as narrative rather than as arguments, they might be far richer because I think my tendency to fill in the gaps in the violinist story is something your students do as well and that seems to me to offer a far broader range of questions and ethical scenarios than the argument alone. Especially if you can relate it back to abortion. I mean the whole kidnapping issue, to begin with. Is pregnancy, even accidental or as the result of the non-consensual sex, comparable to being kidnapped?
So interesting.
That was a very interesting snippet.
I can get past the analogy of pregnancy to kidnapping just fine. Whether by nonconsent or accident, the pregnancy was unexpected and unwanted.
The part where I get tripped up is that the violinist is a stranger, and a fetus is not. A mother has an inherent moral and legal responsibility to her children. To illustrate this point: mothers can get in trouble if they do not provide adequate care for their child. For example, not feeding her child would be considered very bad indeed. Not feeding a stranger is rather expected. Mothers are required to feed, clothe and house their children, and generally, do what they can to ensure a healthy life. The exact parameters may vary, but explicitly ending the life is a no-no. When they don’t do this, not only do their children get taken away from them, but they also face negative consequences (both legal in the form of negligence/abuse charges and moral in the form of societal condemnation).
So I don’t think this argument proves that if a fetus is a life from the start, that abortion is therefore morally acceptable.
I’m still pro-choice, but just sayin’.
Not weighing in on the rightness or wrongness of abortion – that is a moral issue and is different for every single person. Your morals are not mine, nor are mine yours – we might both end up in the same place but how we get there is our own business, as long as we operate within the law.
What bothers me about the senario of the violinist is that the donor HAS NO CHOICE. You wake up one morning and out of the blue there is another person attached to you that you have to care for for the next nine months. With very few exceptions the CHOICE to become pregnant lies with the women. If you choose not to take the precautions necessary to deny conception, then the you must deal with the consequences – in whatever way your morality deems you deal with it.
If the senaro with the violinist offered the donor a choice, the donor agrees and then changes her mind – that would be a better analogy to pregnancy/abortion. As presented the senario seems to be more a choice/no choice issue than a pregnancy/abortion issue to me.
This is very interesting to me because I’ve been musing lately on how reading a certain sub-genre of fiction has changed my outlook in a particular way and I’ve been thinking a lot about the ability of fiction to be a testing-ground to explore the emotional outcomes of ideas.
Also, despite being pro-choice, I too found the violinist example troubling. I’ve not read the essay so am going purely on your description of the analogy and am not sure how the author goes on to develop the argument. However, what I find difficult about it is the tone of it. The misplaced humour. It invites us to laugh at the absurdity of the story but there is actually quite a strong idea there that might be more powerful if presented differently. What if the violinist was instead merely a random stranger or the woman’s friend/brother/adult child/young child? How do we see those different scenarios? (But presumably this has all been discussed before in great detail if this is one of the most discussed philsophical essays of the last century?)
I have to agree with the other comments. Like Tumperkin said, the story only really talks about one scenario where someone would seek an abortion. I happen to be more pro-life, so to be fair that would affect my option on the essay. I think if the essay was more personal, like instead of a stranger it was a sister or brother you have never met, I think it would have worked better. Honestly this analogy alone would not be enough for me to change my thinking about this topic, but it can open a dialog about abortion nicely.
@Lynne Connolly: Regardless of who makes the decision, a decision has to be made. How should it be made? That is the question we are asking.
I guess one way of looking at it, is to think of the difference between what is legal and what is ethical. Some things may be legal but unethical. Some might be ethical but illegal (physician assisted suicide of marijuana use for the critically ill, for example). I think parents should have the legal right to raise their kids as they wish (within some limits), but within that sphere of permissibility there are any number of unethical things they might do (such as belittle their child in front to others).
I’m just trying to explain what we’re about.
@AQ:
This is what Thomson is trying to show. The “right to life” is really not doing as much work in pro-life arguments as pro-life folks often assume.
@lazaraspaste
I agree. It gets even worse in Thomson’s article, actually. She moves later to a case in which you are trapped in a house with a rapidly growing baby. It is supposed to be analogous to death by pregnancy, but, I mean, who has intuitions about that situation?
@Amber: @Amber:
Right, so this is where the analogy seems to break down. But one question we can ask is where the special obligations mothers have the children are supposed to derive from. If only mothers who accept them, have them, we are back to square one.
It’s tempting to say that just by having consensual sex, protected or not, a woman is somehow obligated to any conceptus that occurs. But … isn;t it sort of odd to say a person (the pregnant woman) has obligations to a future third party entity?
Still, maybe this objection forgets important facts about how our society is organized, namely, in such a way that the mothering relation is very significant, and unlike other kinds of relations. A theorist we look at next week makes this kind of point, which is a good one.
@Daisy:
Yeah, I can see this. But one thing Thompson would say is, “look how far we have come from the original pro-life (anti-choice) argument. This is no longer about the bare right to life at all. Now, it is about the special obligation a pregnant woman has to the fetus because she had consensual sex.”
For Thomson, it makes no difference if you voluntarily did something you knew might create a person’s dependency on you. She gives another analogy of having a house and putting up screens. People seeds are known to inhabit your area, but screens usually keep them out. Alas, one day, people seeds get in despite your best efforts. Are you now responsible for all those people? She thinks your intuition is “no way.”
@Tumperkin:
Yeah I agree. It is so denuded of human context. It;s just not how women make decisions about their pregnancies. But, I suppose Thomson is not going for a phenomenology of unwanted pregnancy. And one way to look at it, is to see her as denying that “rights talk” really gets at what is troubling about unexpected pregnancy. At least, that’s the charitable interpretation I tend to give it.
@Kerith:
I do think it does this. I tell students they may be pro-choice but HATE the way Thomson makes her case here. And they may be pro-life but find something compelling in it anyway. It’s supposed to be teaching critical thinking, so it’s good to get exercise in clarifying one;s own views and understanding the views of others. not just the views, but the justification for them.
One of my problems with the analogy has always been that it overstates the limitations on one’s personal freedom that an ordinary pregnancy involves. Yes, there are some women who have to be on bed-rest for some significant part of their pregnancy, but I and many others spend their whole pregnancies, pretty much, going to work and the opera and the mall and so on. (I’m still a little miffed about the ski trip I didn’t get to do any skiing on, though.)
In the law school class where we discussed the violinist analogy, we also discussed the forced-kidney-donation analogy. While I am sufficiently pro-choice that I would not care for government forcing a parent to donate a kidney to save the life of their child, I would also have a very low opinion of any parent who could do so with reasonable safety but wouldn’t.
I find the “narrative” questions you raise at the end (and commenters pick up on) really interesting.
For instance, the absence of narrative detail/world-building seems like an attempt to keep the thought-experiment “pure,” but it effaces the narrative choices that are made–if I don’t like Classical music, will I read this differently than if I do? Is Thomson making assumptions about what people value? What if it were Rupert Murdoch or an investment banker plugged into me? A serial killer?
As a reader of fiction, I am used to asking how the narrative is “pushing” me to read it in a certain way. I think this narrative wants not to be asked those questions, but they might be important. On the other hand, taking the analogy for the thing itself under discussion–focusing on the particulars of the narrative rather than the larger questions–might mean I miss the whole point.
@etv13: mmm, this comment hits me in a personal way because I actually think many people *understate* the physical effects of pregnancy. Not only was I sick all day, *every* day for the entire time, but I developed cavities for the first time in 36 years, (and now have them regularly) had gestational diabetes that lead to type 2 diabetes, had to spend a fair bit of time recovering from extreme high blood pressure during labor and a c-section (which left a hideous scar,) and suffered severe pre-and post-partum depression. I get PTSD symptoms every year around my son’s birthday and I’m not exaggerating. And this for a pregnancy I desperately wanted and had been trying to have for 8 years. It was totally worth it, but imagine if I hadn’t wanted that child…
My experience is not that uncommon, I know now. For some reason, no one ever mentions that some people have “morning sickness” the entire time and that pregnancy can cause dental issues. But once you’re in that situation, suddenly everyone around you says, “oh yeah, that happens all the time.” In the same way, no one warned me about the effects of gestational diabetes on breastfeeding, and it was only after I wound up stuck to a breast pump that I discovered how common it is for women to have to pump without actually breastfeeding. (I was so thrilled when Tine Fey wrote about this in Bossypants./)
Moving on, I’m not sure this makes logical sense, but whenever I start to wonder if I’m actually pro-choice, I think about how it would feel to be forced to abort a baby that I wanted. Being forced to carry a pregnancy I didn’t want feels like a personal violation in a similar way.
I’m just chiming in to say that I’m feeling a lot smarter for having visited today – I’ve never taken a philosophy course or thought about any of these things, so getting these glimpses is a bit of a treat for me actually.
@willaful: I am truly sorry you had such a tough time of it, and very glad you deem it all worth it. My experience had some things in common with yours (gestational diabetes, a root canal at 38 weeks after losing an old filling in a helping of mu shu pork, an emergency c-section), but it sounds like overall it was qualitatively quite different. I felt pretty well through most of it, which is just as well because, unlike you, I did not particularly want to have a child (though I am now very glad I did). We had been relying on a method of birth control we knew to be unreliable because the pill makes me depressed and neither of us likes condoms, and we had decided to take whatever came. I figured at 37 a baby was unlikely, and was surprised that my unathletic, nerdy-intellectual-person’s body proved to be reasonably competent at producing one.
But I don’t think anyone could say, without a lot more evidence, that either of our experiences is typical. For starters, it sounds like we were both a bit older than the average mother. All in all, women’s desires and expectations and experiences vary greatly, which underscores the importance of keeping the full spectrum of choices available. No one should be forced to go through with a pregnancy she didn’t want, any more than she should be forced to abort a pregnancy she did. Yet I still find the violinist analogy clunky and unpersuasive. Maybe that’s because I’m not in the target demographic — I don’t believe that a non-viable fetus is a person, so the analogy fails for me from the start. Maybe I’m just ornery — whenever I hear “You can’t use the master’s tools to tear down the master’s house,” I’m thinking, “Why the hell can’t you?” Here I want to argue with the premises: no one’s asking most pregnant women to hang out in a hospital bed for nine months; if the violinist is so damn good, how come nobody in the music lover’s society is volunteering for the job? if for some strange medical reason I’m the only compatible “donor”, why didn’t they just ask me? For Itzahk Perlman or Hilary Hahn I might just do it. (I met Emanuel Ax once, and he was a really sweet guy — why does it have to be a violinist and not a pianist? Or a rock star? If my husband could have kept Freddie Mercury alive via a nine-month sacrifice of his autonomy, there’s a decent chance he would have done it.) Why aren’t they paying me — surely they could raise a couple of million dollars to compensate me for my time? And most of all, like other people in this thread, I want to know, why is it a stranger? That really seems to me to be the weakest point in the analogy. Our children, even our fetuses, aren’t strangers. They are intimately connected to us from the get-go.
Going back to my personal experience here: I knew very early that I was pregnant, and some pain led my doctor to send me for an ultrasound at about six weeks, to rule out the possibility of an ectopic pregnancy. They made me drink about a gallon of water, and then kept me waiting in the waiting room for about an hour; by the time I got to the ultrasound, I was exceedingly cranky, to say the least. And yet, when I saw the flutter on the monitor that they said was the fetus’s heartbeat, I forgot all the irritation and discomfort. It was wonderful and fascinating. I still don’t believe she was a person yet, but . . . It’s complicated.
What I learned from this is that science fiction/fantasy has a useful place in ethics discussions!
I wasn’t trying to claim my experience was typical, just making the point that pregnancy carries far more risks than are generally known and those risks need to be taken into account. It’s not necessarily just 9 months of not being able to drink. Though even if pregnancy were risk free, I would still be pro-choice.
I’m not sure how I feel about the metaphor including a stranger. An unwanted pregnancy can feel very invasive. (Someone once told me that for her having an abortion was like having a tumor removed. Unless she was in deep denial, she had no conflicted feelings at all. I wish I still knew her and could find out if her feelings changed over time.) Having actually had a child, my feelings about such a pregnancy now are very different than they were when I was younger, unmarried and not a mother. There seems to me a vast psychological difference between aborting an unwanted fetus and aborting what could be your child’s brother or sister.
This is a very different analogy than the violinist – in which a stranger is attached to you through no actions/decision/choice of your own.
Putting up screens(using a condom) usually prevents the people seeds (sperm)from coming in, but not always. It is your choice to open the window(have sex) knowing the screens might not work, therefore you are responsible for the consequences if you choose to open the window.
Thomson is wrong – I am always responsible for the choices I make, whether I like the outcome or not.
Okay, it’s two twenty in the morning. My sleeping patterns for the last six weeks have been completely shot so I hope this will make some sense.
I’ve been thinking about this post on and off again, trying to take my thoughts on the pro-choice/anti-choice positions out of the equations as well as current modern cultural conditioning on motherhood and children. I almost think it’s the cultural conditioning that is harder to get pass.
Oh, I just found the entire essay. Will read that now.
http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/Phil160,Fall02/thomson.htm
Okay, I now know I will need much more processing time. I also know that I also should’ve included slut-shaming in my cultural conditioning mention. Because I heard it so clearly but didn’t want to acknowledge it.
***eta*** and that I will need to re-read the original essay and your post about three or four times to get all of the nuances and arguments being presented. ***
But what do you mean by “responsible” in this context?: you can be “responsible for the consequences if you choose to open the window” and then, having taken the responsible step of minimising risk, if any seeds do get in, couldn’t the “responsible” thing to do be to pull out any seeds that begin to grow inside the house?
Since the post was about storytelling, I thought I might as well add that the analogy about the giant baby growing inside and crushing the mother to death mentions that
and this reminded me of the idea that once you let a vampire into your house, however inadvertently, you can’t get it to leave simply by asking it to do so. But you are entitled to drive a stake through its heart.
So now I’m thinking that the violinist might really be a vampire, dependent on the woman’s blood for its life. Is she responsible for keeping the vampire alive even if it will transform her into one of the undead? Do vampires have a right to an (undead) life which trumps the rights of the woman?
Also, Twilight would suggest that vampire babies do burst open the “house” of their mother’s uterus, almost certainly killing her if she is not herself transformed into a vampire.
I was worried I was going off at a tangent but then I remembered your argument that
I learn that only in philosophy can it be proven that babies are the same as vampires.
@Laura Vivanco – the short answer to your question is – yes, pulling the seeds out could be the responsible thing to do.
The longer answer becomes – Is the moral thing? Is it the right thing? Is it the culturally correct thing? That decision is different for each person and will result in more consequences that you will have to live with. Either way, choosing to keep the seeds or choosing to remove them – you don’t get to whine about it or blame someone else for your own choices.
Oh, I’m only a literary critic, not a philosopher, so I wasn’t trying to create a logically rigorous analogy, I was just intrigued by the thought of comparisons between things which cross thresholds when only unintentionally invited. But after you left your comment I was curious and did a bit of Googling just now and lo and behold, someone who teaches medical ethics has, in fact, already come up with the analogy between vampires and fetuses. And since the comparison includes the words “rights are not magic bullets” I’m now off on another tangent and wondering if one could think of rights as silver bullets
In what sense do you mean “don’t get to”?
Laura V.,
I just reread my post and of course, there is a mistake. I meant to write “romance still thumps logic,” not vice-versa. This just further proves, of course, my failure at thinking logically and making the right conclusion, which was probably the reason for my grade in logic class (not checking all my negatives before my p’s and q’s).
You’re also now to be blamed for my morning ruminations of whether a vampire baby is born or made. In a narrative about love (and death), would a vampire mated couple want a baby? And “make” one? And would they consider it their vampire, since it would be dependent on them forever. Never mind. More coffee, please!
@etv13:
True, most women are not on bedrest for 9 months.
@etv13:
I think this is an implicit point of the essay: that government protected rights only get us so far in thinking about this complex moral issue.
@Liz:
Exactly! I would investigate these in PHI 351/ENG 420, but not in PHI 100.
@Liz:
I agree. I find I do sometimes take time to point to things in the narrative. For example, many examples of moral dilemmas in the philosophical canon put “homeless man” wherever they need a convenient scaegoat. I can’t let that pass. Others use “fat man” to the same effect.
@willaful:
Thanks for sharing your experience. I think one thing that unfortunate is how the pro-life folks understate the risks and negative effects of pregnancy, even when it is going relatively well, and overstate the risks of abortion.
I am not sure whether the analogy really depends on “9 months” (this overstatement of the typical limitations a pregnant woman might face), though, b/c Thomson believes — and believes you will agree — that although it would be “morally decent” of you, the violinist’s rights to not obligate you to do it for even 1 day.
@etv13:
She says at one point that it doesn’t matter if you became a member of the SML knowing this was a possibility. Again, the point she is making is that the violinist has a right to life, but that right to life does not entail any obligation on your part.
@Kaetrin: Thank you!
@Victoria Janssen: Oh, absolutely. This is especially clear to me in bioethics, but really, any good writing is philosophically interesting in some way.
@willaful:
And this is one of the problems with moral theory and abortion: Thomson, like so many philosophers who write on abortion, write as if we can figure out whether all (or some large swath) abortions are morally acceptable or all aren’t. IRL, women’s decisions about abortion reflect a very complicated mix of thoughts, desires, beliefs, and motives.
@Daisy:
As Laura points out below, I think Thomson would agree that a good person will accept consequences and deal responsibly with them. It;s just that in her view, since the people seeds have no claim on you, an early, safe abortion would count as one of those responsible ways.
But yes, the pull of the idea that by taking an action which one knows might lead to pregnancy somehow creates an obligation to the fetus is very strong. It is important to acknowledge it and figure out where it comes from and whether it rules out abortion.
@Laura Vivanco:
There was a vamp connection and I missed it?! *headesk* Thank you for that.
Being trained in feminist theory, I am so unlikely to ever see the fetus as a “vampire in the belly”! (I’m thinking of Luce Irigaray’s Je, Tu, Nous and work so many feminists have done to acknowledge the vital active role the pregnant woman plays in sustaining a fetus. It’s not incompatible, but on the surface there is a tension.)
@Gennita Low:
LOL. Not at all. The image of the fetus as a “vampire in the belly” of nonphilosophical origin! I am pretty sure Stephanie Meyer invented it.
@Laura Vivanco: Great link! thanks!
@Gennita Low:
Thanks for that — I was going to ask and forgot.
I keep coming back to this; you are so right that arguments by analogy are by nature irritating. Now I’m being chafed by the “for the rest of your life” variant. Again, I think this way overstates what being a parent entails, in terms of limitations on one’s autonomy. But aside from that, I keep thinking about what that means for the violinist. The violinist is unconscious — presumably because for the analogy to a fetus to work, the violinist has to have gotten into this situation through no will of his own. The fetus, after all, didn’t ask to be conceived. But if the violinist is to go on being unconsciously attached to the donor for the rest of her life, what on earth is the point? This seems to really distort the notion of a right to life in the abortion context. A fetus, if allowed to grow and develop, eventually becomes an autonomous human being; the attached-for-the-rest-of-the-donor’s-life violinist doesn’t. This just strikes me as a wholly unnecessary complication (and an exaggeration of what’s at stake in the typical pregnancy). Or a completely simplifying one. If the violinist is never going to play again, is never even going to be awake again, what is the point? Why does the Society of Music Lovers want to keep him alive? What meaning does his life have for anyone, including himself? We’re in Terry Schiavo territory, and while I recognize that there are people who don’t see a distinction between Terry Schiavo and a fetus, I do. While I might feel a moral obligation to keep a great violinist (or even a mediocre one) alive by giving up my autonomy for nine months, after which the donee is healed and able to go about his life, I wouldn’t feel any obligation to keep someone “alive” but unconscious for the rest of my life and his.
As for vampires, I think they have a right not to be murdered, but of course if they are threatening you with serious bodily harm, you have a right to drive a wooden stake through them (or show them a cross, or sprinkle them with holy water, or expose them to sunlight) and kill them. This is not a hard question, at least in theory; self-defense has been a recognized justification for homicide for centuries. And when we come to irritating analogies, vampire-fetus has to be among the most irritating. A vampire has had his chance at life, even if he was turned as a teenager and that was last Saturday. He’s a conscious, autonomous being who has to take moral responsibility for his own actions. What thinking about vampires can tell us about the moral rights of embryos and fetuses I can’t imagine.